Monday, May 27, 2013

Scientists this
week announced they may have found a lost continent off the coast of Brazil.
Granite boulders dredged from the
seafloor off the coast of South America two years ago could be remnants of a
long-vanished continent, according to Roberto Ventura Santos, the geology
director of Brazil's Geology Service.

According to National Geographic:

"This could be the Brazilian Atlantis," Santos
said, adding that he was speaking metaphorically and not claiming to have found
the legendary sunken world.

"Obviously, we don't expect to find a lost city
in the middle of the Atlantic."

Santos speculated that the granite—a relatively
low-density rock found in continental crust—belonged to a continent that was
submerged when Africa and South America drifted apart and formed the Atlantic
Ocean about 100 million years ago.

But Michael Wysession, an Earth and planetary
scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, noted that granite can find
its way onto the seafloor through other means.

"There are pieces of granite in the middle of
the seafloor that date to about 800 million years ago when we had a snowball
earth scenario and there were large pieces of rock embedded in ice
rafts"—mobile glaciers, essentially—"all over the ocean,"
explained Wysession.

Tides represent the high and low, the ebb and flow. They're the rhythm spanning millennia and an apt image for this blog as it seeks to provide accounts linking today with ages long past. New archaeological finds and scholarly speculations help us better understand our ancestors and this small planet we've shared. And the better we understand our forebears and their environs, the better we know ourselves.

A Top History Site

Ancient Tidesis in the Top 5 favorite ancient-history blogs at Baidun Galleries, one of the world's leading dealers in rare and exquisite antiquities, located in Jerusalem. A Baidun spokesman said Ancient Tides is among "a few reputable bloggers pertaining to ancient history that we thought deserved a shout out."

Ancient Tides is the top blog in the Ancient History category at Masters in History, a portal for online degrees in History.

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Ancient Tides has been called one of the top ancient history blogs by Ace Online Schools, a guide to schools, degrees and other educational programs.

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Ancient Tides is listed among the "Top 100 History Blogs" by Guide to Online Schools, a portal to various online education programs.